Ask an AI assistant to find a Sydney venue for 80 senior executives and you will get a confident shortlist in seconds. What you won’t get are the venues it can’t see, and new research suggests that is most of them.

Since 2007, our team has worked on the operational side of B2B technology events across Australia. We have managed sponsor booths, coordinated booth builders and printers, and sat with stand teams at 7am working out why the demo screen will not talk to the laptop.

The formal idea of an “event portfolio” comes from strategic-management thinking: the same portfolio logic used in finance and product strategy, applied to a collection of events rather than a single occasion.